When we started taking advertising, I really thought that we’d get a lot more bFM -level advertising – ads from people who were part of the same communities as the readership – but that has never really happened

Whoa - I am part of this community and purchased a banner ad on PA . Admittedly only a grand's worth. Mind you, bugger all people clicked through on it . Wasn't a very flash ad though .

I guess you've got different models and motivations. I/S I guess is happy to run his site as a community participation without reward (and in turn benefits from Google's caring more about territory than dollars). Similarly the Standard. Other sites (including most of my job) are paid for by government and community institutions.

(And as for ethically: my screen, my eyeballs, my brain. Absolutely I get to control and filter my inputs however I like. Your rights as a creator do not extend to parasitizing my brain space, or to dictating how I experience and interact with your product)

Do you exercise your rights similarly with off-line content? Do you have someone blank out the ads in magazines, or hold up screens in front of bus-shelter advertising?

No. It’s that creators of content want to feed their children and buy them Christmas presents and go out to dinner and pay for school uniforms and …

Consumers of content, particularly on the internet, often forget that there is a real person spending time and energy on content. If somehow that time is not rewarded then the creator must get the money for doctors visits somewhere else and spend less time creating.

As someone less able to create I am only too willing to see my earnings support the creators of content.

BUT I am very unwilling to see my earnings support advertising executives lunches instead of the creator of the content I enjoy. Same applies to Kim Dotcom who creates nothing for me hence I don’t want my earnings to be tracked to him.

That’s why I like patronage as a model. Subscriptions are exclusive by nature, but patronage enables the creator without limiting the number of people who benefit.

Not an advertising solution to dying media - but [www.nsfwcorp.com] - a great and innovative news and comment outfit based in Las Vegas seem to be doing well with a combination of good content, design and a VERY reasonable subscription model - 3 bucks a month when I last checked.

In this vein, Peter Sunde's Flattr has an interesting model. Content creators can put a Flattr button on their site or on individual articles, kind of like a Facebook "like" button. Content consumers pay Flattr a fixed monthly fee, then go around clicking the Flattr buttons on any content they like. At the end of the month, their fee is divided up between all the things (e.g. articles) they've clicked on (Flattr takes 10%). It can get quite finely detailed - individual authors or even commenters could have their own Flattr accounts.Not sure how well it's worked so far, however. Certainly there needs to be a critical mass of sites and users on board before it can be particularly effective.

But the internet is really good for that. The problem with patronage used to be that the time spent getting the donations meant the donations had to be large to be worth bothering with. Now it should be easy to make any size donation at any time.

I'm not sure I see a problem with matching donors with recipients if you can make the donation on the page - but I'm guessing there is a problem with simply having donors click a button and nominate an amount - otherwise why don't we have it already.

I think I/S needs content-aware GPS accelerometer-equipped AR glasses with commercial-message image-sensing pixel-replacement software. Didn't Google work with Adobe on something like this? Maybe it could also replace the heads of people he doesn't like with a big smiley.

Patronage is at the heart of public broadcasting – or more accurately what’s left of it – in NZ.

With a return to the unwieldy-to-enforce licence fee unlikely, a patronage/tipjar model wouldn’t rake in enough money to sustain a successor to TVNZ 6 & 7. Their fatal weakness was that a 5-year guarantee was too short and that they were at the whim of the electoral cycle, and much of their content is now behind a SKY TV paywall. Additionally, the owners of Stratos threw in the towel and signed up to SKY, after previously being a strong critic of the pay TV monopoly situation.

When I was at the Wellington Save TVNZ7 meeting, VUW’s Dr Peter Thompson put forward a proposal for a small communications levy on broadcasters and ISPs. Although quite an original idea, I’m not sure if it’s any more resistant to political tennis than the TVNZ 6 & 7 model.

And I've previously mentioned that Al Gore sold the like-minded Current TV to Al-Jazeera, which isn't on SKY yet. Given the bible-thumping background of its CEO, probably never.

I am more troubled by the potential of unbreakable encryption to be used by paedophile rings

1. Unbreakable encryption is already freely available to anyone who cares to use it.2. Any encrypted thing must be decrypted by an end user to be useful to them. There will be traces on any end devices where this has happened. A user sufficiently clueful to eradicate such traces is a user already in the group of people identified in 1 above.3. The real enabling technology for socially harmful information of this kind is not encryption but recording. I cannot understand the logical grounds on which people whose go-to objection to new tech is the child porn angle tolerate the free availability of cameras.4. WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN.5. After at least 20 years of child porn, bomb making and other internet scares, haven't we had enough, for fuck sake?